Crawling to Confession

The school counselor comes into my classroom once a week and teaches a social-emotional lesson. It's a great collaboration and I adore it. I’m pretty sure she feels the same way but I know if she didn’t, she wouldn’t tell me anyways and just gently try to point things out. Eventually, I would pick up on it. 😉

She created this great lesson around honesty and guilt. She had a wonderful story to read to the kids discussing the phrase “a monkey on my back.” There will be a handful of future blog posts on this topic because we are now strategically using this lesson in collaboration with parents. There was never a planned date that we were going to teach this lesson. She’d bring it up and there’d be a natural place for us to plan for it and it always worked out to be helpful each year.

One year, I was approached by a parent about her daughter’s choices. I had a great relationship with this family and had taught their oldest daughter during the pandemic–so that pretty much weirdly bonds teachers, students, and families. This year, the mom told me that she was pretty sure her youngest daughter (my current student) had snuck a peek in the trunk of their van to see the gifts from Santa. She said her daughter was insistent that she didn’t look at the gifts and didn’t quite believe her but also couldn’t get her to reveal the truth. She asked me to let her know if her daughter ever let it slip or was bragging about it to classmates. It was the perfect time for the “monkey on my back” story. 

I gave the counselor a heads up that I may be calling on little Suzy more often. She could not have read the story better for this situation! She was pausing at perfect times, asking thought-provoking questions, Suzy was answering them, and I was sure I could see the guilt all over Suzy's face…it was just a matter of how she was going to handle it. The story ended happily with a child revealing some truth to its parents so that everyone felt relieved and was never dishonest again. Cheesy, but a feel-good story with a powerful lesson. 

I glanced over at Suzy–whose jaw was on the floor. She slowly turned to look at me and I quickly turned so she didn’t see me staring at her. She began crawling across the rug to me where I was sitting on a chair, crawled up in my lap, looked at me teary-eyed and whispered, “I have a monkey to get off my back.”